(A rave provoked by an extract from Jon Faine's book, Lawyers in the Alice: Aboriginals and whitefellas' Law,
in the Age in July 1994, )

by Gary Foley
Copyright 31st June 1994

One of the ways in which racism manifests itself is when someone writes
about a people in a manner that dehumanises them, and presents them as incidental, nameless
victims apparently incapable of playing a role in their own affairs; non-persons able only to achieve
liberation on the advent of the "good guys" (ie Ernest young white lawyers from Melbourne) arrive
like the cavalry to save the day. This is the impression one gains from the extract of Jon Faine's
apparent romantic glorification of members of the Melbourne legal profession and their Daisy
Bates-style saving of the Aborigines. (The "Age" Thurs July 1994)

The truth about the history of Aboriginal legal services and the Aboriginal
community's relationship with the legal profession is dramatically different to the fantasies of Mr
Faine's mind. To examine the truth is to not only expose the myth of Jon Faine's idealistic imaginings,
but will also probably deflate a few Melbourne legal ego's along the way.

As a member of the group of Aboriginal people who, in Redfern and Fitzroy
between 1969 - 71 conceived and created the first community-controlled, shop-front, free legal-aid
centres in Australia, I feel that I might be even better placed than Mr Faine to provide a brief history
of Aboriginal legal services as perceived from a Koori community viewpoint.

The first major difference between my perception and that of Mr Faine's is
that in my version all of the heroes are Koori's and very, very few lawyers are recalled with any
fondness at all. However, if you read Mr. Faine's extract, Aboriginal people exist only as un-named
victims or people in need of help, whilst many members of the legal profession (some with relatively
brief stints in ALS's) are not only named, but subsequent career achievements are provided in loving
detail. The solitary Aboriginal exception to this rule is Ms Pat O'Shane, but she seems to named more
because she is a "Magistrate" and "first woman layer in Alice Springs" rather than for her Aboriginality
or her not insignificant contribution to the Koori struggle over 20 years.

The second difference with Mr Faine involves the history of how Aboriginal
legal services began and what has happened since. If we are to believe Mr Faine's version which
focuses on one relatively late developing service in Alice Springs and the Victorian Aboriginal Legal
Service (for which the driving force was certainly not non-Koori lawyers), then it was the involvement
of "eminent" Melbourne white-middle class lawyers, fresh and idealistic from university that were the
major catalyst for everything leading up to Mabo. Furthermore, we are asked to swallow another Faine
fantasy that the "land rights movement" culminated with Mabo. In the words of the song, "It ain't
necessarily so!" and the truth as perceived by Aboriginal community is radically different.

Free legal aid was introduced to Australia in 1970, not by the legal profession,
but rather by a small group of Koori community people in Redfern who at the time were labelled as
"radicals" and "Black Power activists" by mainstream Australia. The preceding three years had seen
the Redfern Aboriginal community expand from about 2000 people in 1967 to more than 36,000 by the
end of 1969 as large numbers of NSW Kooris joined the mass exodus from the 45 old reserves
(concentration camps) around the state, which were closed down after the 1967 referendum. As
the new arrivals came to the city they inevitably ended up in Redfern and adjacent inner-city slum
areas until there was a massive, impoverished black community which formed a sort of a ghetto in
the sense that the Koori community stuck together and helped each other to survive.

There was no such thing as the "emerging middle-class Aboriginal activists"
of Jon Faine's imagination! They were not to emerge until in the years after Whitlam when the young
white Lawyers of the ALS gained great influence over government policy and deliberately set about
to create an artificial elite pseudo-leadership of Aboriginal Australia with whom they could deal. The
disastrous "throw money at it" policies of the Hawke/Keating governments did most to facilitate the
rapid grow of the tiny new black bourgeoisie who have been the only significant Koori recipients to
benefit from the vast amounts of monies spent each year in the name of Aborigines. This new ALP-
created black elite also increasingly are the new "hatchet men/women" doing the government's dirty
work against the Koori community in return for their thirty pieces of silver. (how remarkably similar to the policy of the notorious
USA Bureau of Indian Affairs!)

The Redfern Aboriginal Legal Service was created by people who lived in
Redfern as part of the impoverished, 36,000 strong Koori community. It came about as a community
response to the major NSW Police campaign of harassment and intimidation that occurred in Redfern
during 1969 - 70. This harassment campaign seemed at the time to be the NSW government's
overreacting to the sudden arrival of 30,000 landless, impoverished refugee's in the Redfern,
Newtown, Waterloo and Alexandria areas of inner-city Sydney.

By mid 1969 a group of community activists had formed and was collecting
information about police activities in Redfern, an activity that was quite dangerous in that virtually all
members of the group had been arrested, beaten and/or harassed by members of the NSW Police
"21 Division" (a notorious NSW squad that had been established in the 1930's to combat the
Darlinghurst "razor gangs") who were turned loose to "quell the uppity blacks" of Redfern in 1969.
After nine months or so data collecting, the group of activists, who included Paul Coe, Gary Williams,
Lyn Thompson, Billy Craigie, Isobel Coe, Shirley (Mum Shirl) Smith, Tony Coorie and a few others,
had accumulated enough information to approach someone outside our community for help in setting
up a concept that we had developed and now wanted to put into practice.

The only things missing from the recipe were lawyers. You can't run a shop-
front legal aid centre without lawyers, and the problem in Australia in 1970 was that there were NO
Aboriginal lawyers. This was simply an indication of the extent to which Aboriginal people had been
systematically excluded from education opportunities up till that time, but it nevertheless meant that
we were reluctantly forced to seek support from non-Koori lawyers. It must be said that the non-Koori l
egal profession in 1970 did not initially flock to the cause in the manner suggested in the Faine
extract. In fact it was not until Paul Coe was able to convince the then Head of the Law Faculty of
UNSW, Prof Hal Wootten, to join the cause that the NSW legal community bothered to respond
meaningfully.

By the time Professor Wootten was recruited by Paul Coe and Gary Williams,
the Redfern Koori community had already conceived the basic design of a shop-front legal aid centre
operating with a team of volunteer lawyers working on a roster basis, under community direction and
control. The concept had evolved from ideas picked up from Afro- American political literature, and
the writings of Franz Fanon and others, stitched into the developing political ideology and philosophy
of the first generation of the Koori Resistance to have been able to operate in relative freedom from
government control. It was logical therefore that a major focus of the Koori community at the time was
to extend and consolidate the hard won gains of the referendum and the opening to the concentration
camps, and that Koori community control over all organisations that functioned in their communities
would be a key issue in the 1970' and 1980's. (It must be said that as we look around today we seem
more remote from genuine community self determination than we were twenty years ago, but that's a
longer story).

The first large-scale Aboriginal legal, housing, medical and children's self-help
programs, were developed by the Redfern Aboriginal community during the political/cultural Decade
of Uprising that began when the Gurindji's walked off Wave Hill, and ended a decade later after the
"Aboriginal Embassy" played a key role in the final destabilisation of the McMahon Government and
the election of Whitlam and the beginning of a supposedly "new" approach. The new organisations
that emerged in Redfern between 1969 to 1974 were called "Community-controlled, community-survival
programs". It was said that these organisations were only meant to exist to alleviate specific,
immediate problems confronting the community, and that they would become redundant when the
"real answer" became reality.

The "real answer" was, and still is, considered to be contained in the
concept of Land Rights in which Koori communities would strive for economic self-sufficiency as
a means of achieving genuine Self-Determination, and thus being in a position, as clans, groups
and communities, to decide for themselves what kind of niche they wanted for themselves and
their children's, children in the Australia of tomorrow. Land Rights in the manner envisaged by the
Koori activists would also enable for the first time a Koori-run, multi-faceted and coordinated attack
on all the inter-related problems confronting the community, thus building in greater chance of
success. But until then, the legal, health and other self-help programs were supposed to ensure
that the Koori community members at least survived to see the day Land Rights came in the form
we sought. Alas, in terms of that we still wait.....

Nevertheless, in 1969 - 70, as the concept was developing among the
Redfern political activists, despite occasional adopting and adapting of bits and pieces of good
ideas from the mainly Afro-American and African political books we were stealing from Bob Gould's
"Third World Bookshop" (it wasn't till later that he got in books about other Indigenous peoples
struggles, and later also that he did a deal with the Koori activists to stop stealing books in return
for him "giving" them the ones they wanted) the concepts that evolved were uniquely Koori in a
range of ways, even in the way in which the concepts themselves evolved and were fine-tuned
in the community itself.

So therefore it can be said that the original concept of free, shopfront
Aboriginal legal-aid centres was very much a Koori community idea without any input whatsoever
by any non-Koori lawyers. In fact, there is a considerable school of opinion in Aboriginal Australia
that the later (1973 onwards) advent of the salaried lawyers and vast Govt sums allocated to ALS's
esulted in most of them ultimately being controlled and run by non-Koori lawyers and this in turn led
o the dramatic decline in quality of service provided by ALS's ever since.

Nevertheless in 1971 the Redfern Koori activists were able to open the
doors of the Redfern Aboriginal Legal Service, and for a brief, eighteen month period, the Redfern
ALS functioned as the community envisioned it, and was able to provide assistance to hundreds of
Kooris in that period, but more importantly, when they won our first cases against the police (the first
victory involved Aboriginal TV star, Bindi Williams, who had been arrested on a trumped-up charge i
n Victoria park near Glebe) it led to a boost to the collective psychological mood of the large Redfern
Koori community. This tremendous surge of confidence burst out of Redfern in the form of the Black
Moratorium Demonstrations that erupted along the east coast cities and towns of Australia from
Adelaide to Cairns during 1970 -72. This series of demonstrations forced Prime Minister William
McMahon to, on Invasion Day (Australia Day) 1972, make his ill-fated "major policy announcement
on Aboriginal Land Rights" which directly led to the famous Aboriginal Embassy demonstrations. Mr
McMahon's brutal suppression of those demonstrations was televised around the world, to his
embarrassment and consternation, and the fiasco directly contributed to his downfall at the end of
1972.

Thus it was true at the time that the establishment of the Redfern Aboriginal
Legal Service by the so-called radical "Black Power" political activists was a major turning point in
Aboriginal history as the first of the new community-controlled "Self-help" programs, and was a major
catalyst in leading to the "Aboriginal Embassy", which in turn changed the course of Australian history.

By the time Jon Faine and his middle-class university mates were looking for
a pre-career diversion, the principle of Aboriginal community control of their own affairs was firmly
entrenched in the major Aboriginal communities in south-eastern Australia and the politically
sophisticated Koori community of Melbourne was no place for opinionated young lawyers who
felt that they knew what was best for others. The mass exodus of some of the "best" brains in
potential ALS lawyer ranks from Melbourne to Alice Springs must have perplexed members of the
Victorian Koori community who knew full well that there were more than enough major problems
confronting the local community to keep all of the lawyers who left the state busy for ten years.
Perhaps the eager young Melbourne lawyers, in their almost absolute ignorance of the history of
the areas where they grew up in Victoria, believed the prevailing racist notion among their ilk that
these people in the NT who needed their help are the "real" Aborigines!

How else can one explain the strange idea that a lawyer should leave a
state where in real terms Aboriginal/Police relations are at crisis point, and go to somewhere else
to help ease other peoples problems that are essentially the same, except that the victims look that
ittle bit more reassuringly black and thus more "authentic".

An additional irony of the "anywhere but Victoria" mentality of the Melbourne
legal fraternity then was the fact that the young Redfern Koori activists had been considerably
influenced and inspired by the Victorian Koori community's political actions conducted throughout
the mid and late 1960's and early 1970's. The NSW Koori movement had always admired the
Victorians for their superior organising skills, and their more disciplined and creative political actions,
which had been widely publicised during that time. In Victoria, a controversy had raged from the mid
to late 1960's about the future of Lake Tyers in Gippsland. At one stage representations had been
made by Victorian Koori's to Amnesty International and the United Nations in relation to Lake Tyers.

Also, the so-called "Black Power" issue in Australia had been born in
Melbourne when the Koori community simply sought to establish Koori community control over their
own organisation, the Aborigines Advancement League (AAL). Names like Chairman of Lake Tyers
Community, Charles Carter, AAL officials Pastor Doug Nichols and Bruce McGuinness were major
media identities of the late 60's, early '70's, given the extent of newspaper and TV coverage they
were able to gain for the Aboriginal community's struggle for justice then.

Furthermore, for about five years prior to the establishment of the Victorian
ALS, the Aborigines Advancement League had conducted a quasi-legal aid service from their office
in Northcote using volunteer lawyers where possible, or League officials appearing for Koori people
when no lawyers could be found. In one six month period in 1969, then AAL Director, Bruce
McGuinness made 23 appearances for Kooris fronting court (with lawyers organised by him appearing i
n 10 of those cases), 28 prison visits, bail/lock-up appearances). This practice of organising what
legal assistance they could was began by League Director Doug Nichols, perfected by McGuinness,
and maintained by subsequent AAL administrations, including that of the late Stewart Murray.

So it could hardly be said that the Melbourne Koori community people who
included Jim Berg, Margaret Berg, Stewart Murray and others who met in 1973 to set up the Victorian
Aboriginal Legal Service were all that desperately in need of gratuitous advice from a bunch of
inexperienced, opinionated, middle class, pseudo-leftie lawyers fresh out of Melbourne and Monash
Universities. In fact if there was a real hero of the white lawyers involved about that time, it was
Elizabeth Eggleston of Monash University, who because of her unique (among lawyers) capacity
to listen to what Aboriginal people had to say, and her respect for our world shown in her refusal to
speak on our behalf and to always seek our permission and approval for any work she did with and
in our community.That the heroes of Mr Faine's story were faced with such strong and experienced
Koori leadership in Melbourne is a more probable reason so many of Jon Faine's "star-studded virtual
roll-call of legal luminaries" headed north. In Alice Springs a less politically experienced and assertive
client community (not to mention more "authentic") made it much easier for young lawyers from the
south to carve out a name for themselves in what they obviously considered to be a more glamorous
and romantic way. Never mind that severe problems remained in the city they had so rapidly departed,
they were too busy racing out buying their R.M.Williams, swags and 4WD's to notice.

Mr. Faine goes on to claim, "No-one went to Alice Springs for a quick buck,
or because it was thought to be good for their career". Yet by that point in his article he has already
gone to great length to describe the subsequent career glories and prestige achieved by most of
these lawyers after they left the ALS. There is no doubt that a stint in an Aboriginal Legal Service
has greatly enhanced the image, career opportunities and curriculum vitae's of many of today's
eminent lawyers and judges.

But if they were all so dedicated and committed, why are they not still there?
Has the problem been solved? Are there no Aboriginal people fronting court in Alice Springs these
days? Did their pool of clients one-day suddenly dry up? Given the on-going imprisonment statistics
of Aboriginal Australians, we doubt it. So how can people who we are to believe are so committed,
walk away after a mandatory minimum sentence/service, so to speak? Furthermore, all non-Koori
professionals who work for Koori organisations usually leave with large payouts for long service
leave, superannuation etc, and their careers are greatly enhanced (as Jon Faine pointed out) by
their c.v.'s now being able to claim work experience in a bona-fide exotic Aboriginal organisation.

This is a particularly galling aspect for the hundreds of real heroes of the Koori movement, the
voluntary workers who in some cases have given a lifetime of unpaid work with no chance of long
service leave or superannuation, and who were working conceiving and designing the organisations
long before the likes of Jon Faine and his mates later turned up and briefly were around before going
on to other stepping-stones in their political, legal and book-selling careers.But don't get me wrong.
I am not saying that all non-Koori professionals who work in Koori communities are cynical exploiters,
I'm saying that the few who are not are known to, and appreciated by our community, but they remain
unsung because that's the way they want it, and you wont find too many, if any, mentioned in Mr
Faine's extract.And, rather than bothering to comment on Mr Faine's preposterous assertion that the
land rights movement culminated with Mabo, instead it should be noted just how many non-Koori
political careers seemed to have been launched from a little token stint in an Aboriginal community
organisation.Whilst it has been obvious for some years to all with eyes, ears and a sense of smell,
that the Aboriginal affairs policies of the Hawke/Keating federal Labor governments have been a
disastrous failure, rather than take urgent corrective measures the Govt instead subjects us all to
a daily dose of patronising reassurances from Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mr Robert Tickner, a
former ALS solicitor. At least three Cabinet Ministers in the present Keating Government are former
ALS solicitors and barristers.

Today, on both sides of the House, in both Senate and the House of
Representative, sit no less than 6 former lawyers of ALS's. Over the past 20 years, literally a dozen
or more former ALS solicitors have been members and Ministers in successive Australian governments.
It is true to say that a veritable gaggle of former ALS lawyers have over the past 12 years have been
involved in the development of the federal Aboriginal affairs policies that have failed so spectacularly.
So, despite all that influence at the heart of power and their experience and first-hand knowledge of
the plight of Koori peoples, they have been able to achieve virtually nothing in the way of improving
the lot of those whose situation helped create the successful political careers these lawyers went on
to enjoy.

Instead, today in most states we see Aboriginal Legal Service's which conceptually in no
way resemble the original ideas born in Redfern 20 years ago, but rather are now lawyer run
organisations which have become little more than conduits for vast amounts of Aboriginal affairs
monies to be transferred straight from the Commonwealth to the legal profession in each state.
Remembering that the Australian Institute of Criminology statistics continue to show regular annual
increases in the numbers of Aboriginal peoples being imprisoned, (Australian Aboriginal people remain
one of the most gaoled people on earth) and black deaths in custody continue unabated, and
considering that ALS's consume hundreds of millions of federal Aboriginal Affairs dollars each year
98% of which goes straight into the pockets of the legal profession) it would seem that the Koori
community has been poorly served indeed by the lawyers who have worked in their ALS's and then
went on to successful political and judicial careers. In closing, I provide one last example of how the
legal profession in Melbourne continues to treat their Koori clients with disdain.

The recent victory in the Supreme Court by the Koori representatives fighting the closure of Northland Secondary College
was marred for the Kooris that night when they saw one of their solicitors being merrily interviewed on
the 7:30 Report about THEIR reactions to the victory! This solicitor had not sought permission to
speak to the media on behalf of the Koori clients or anyone else in the Koori community, and given
that the Northland Koori's have always insisted on speaking for themselves or through their authorised
spokespersons, this solicitor's action was arrogantly presumptuous and insensitive, at best.
The fact that the "7:30 Report" chose to interview a non-Koori person about a Koori community
issue is consistent with all the media's track record for the past 200 years and comes as no surprise.

What was I saying about at the beginning of this article about relegating people to the sidelines of
their own history?